Keynote Presentations

Opening Keynote - Heather McGowan

Change is coming at us with the greatest velocity in human history.

In the single second it took you to read the previous sentence, an algorithm executed 1,000 stock trades. Computers in Visa’s credit card network processed over three million transactions, no doubt a few of them providing payment for the 17 packages that robots helped pack and ship from Amazon’s warehouses. Right now, 56,000 Google searches are returning tens of billions of results links. At this very moment, more than 2.5 million emails are being sent, not all of them by human beings.

Plenary Lunch Speaker - Deborah Santiago

From Enrolling to SERVING: Framing our Story of Latino Student Success

Hispanics have been “found” by institutions, employers, and mainstream leaders looking to address their enrollment and employee shortages. However, their strategies to include us are often formulaic. Serving Hispanic students requires intentionality in addressing our strengths and needs informed by disaggregated data, improved with evidence-based practice and guided by sustaining leadership commitment. This presentation will share perspectives and experiences from institutions committed to being places where Latino and other post-traditional students thrive for broader discussion.

Closing Keynote - Luis Maldonado

"The beginning is the most important part of the work." – Plato

With the start of the new 116th Congress, with new leadership in the US House of Representatives and with 110 newly elected senators and representatives, many things are about to change in Washington, DC -- or are they?

This session will describe what is being done by HACU to prepare for the opportunities and threats that exist for funding and program authority relating to Hispanic-Serving Institutions at DOE, USDA, NSF and others.